In the days before sub-prime mortgages and collateralised debt obligations became part of common parlance, the annual gatherings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank had a distinct rhythm. Finance ministers from western countries would jet into Washington, spend half an hour slapping each other on the back about how well things were going, then turn their attention to the problems of sub-Saharan Africa.

Now, with the global economy on the brink of a double-dip recession, the issues that used to dominate the meetings – debt relief, aid budgets, millennium development goals – have been pushed well down the agenda.

The IMF – the body charged with sorting out the problems of the global economy – has again dominated the past week, with the focus on what its new managing director would do to resolve Europe's sovereign debt crisis and arrest the slide towards a second downturn. The World Bank's big theme for this year – gender equality – barely got a look in.

That was not for the want of trying. The Bank's president, Robert Zoellick, made it clear last week that poor countries are feeling the chill blasting through global markets. "Developing countries are not as well placed as they were in 2008 to withstand another shock," Zoellick said. "Their budgets are not so robust that they can simply spend their way out of trouble; some are walking a monetary policy tightrope, balancing price pressures and these new dangers."

Zoellick's five-year term at the Bank ends next year and there is speculation in Washington that he will not serve another. In the meantime, he has been trying to do what Christine Lagarde's predecessor at the IMF, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, did: give the organisation a makeover. One sign of that is the focus on gender.

"Women are the next big emerging market," Zoellick said. "How can the world reach its full growth potential if it fails to advance the prospects, energies, and contributions of half its population – women and girls?"

But he has also shaken up the Bank's structure: one of his three deputies, British-born Caroline Anstey, started work last week on an agenda that involves making the Bank more open, more transparent, more accountable and more focused on results.

"My job is to take this great unwieldy tanker of an institution, which is 65 years old, and turn it, if not into a speedboat, then into a tugboat," she said. "In the early 1990s the Bank did not focus on corruption and transparency because they were thought to be 'too political'. We didn't focus much on gender… All these things may be political, but they are also economic. Gender and transparency matter for development."

The Bank now has a freedom of Information policy, boasting that it is the first multilateral organisation to have one. There is a list of items that won't be made public, but the assumption is that most documents will be opened up to scrutiny unless there is a good reason to keep them secret.

At a time of budget cuts, Anstey said, there was pressure from donors for anti-corruption measures, transparency and results, but the Bank's clients were pressing for change, too.

Will the new approach work? The Bank still has the support of the big donor countries: it secured a record amount of money when it replenished its concessional lending facility for the least-developed countries.

Aid agencies remain to be convinced, despite plans to give civil society a bigger role in decision making. Max Lawson of Oxfam said: "The Bank has the most diverse workforce in the world. In the canteen you see every colour and creed. But they all went to Harvard and Yale. They're all from elites. And they're all right-wing economists. The Bank's world view has not changed."

Anstey accepts that change won't happen overnight. For last week's meeting, the Bank's atrium was festooned with placards on the theme of equality. The effect was lost on some male staffers until it was explained to them that the placards represented laundry, and the things holding them in place were clothes pegs.